Adventures in Book Promotion Day 3 (Part I): Amazonian Knots

These days, it seems self-publishing is only really doable with the help of the online bookselling monolith. In some ways that’s great! Having their help with everything from sales presence to the creation of the actual, physical book is a BIG help! But in other ways… it can feel like a worse knot than Piper’s Rapunzel (self-promotion-within-self-promotion FTW!)

If you clicked the first link here, you saw that I have a little work to do cleaning up my profile before the big “Guts and Glory” push. My bio is a bit dated, for one, and my name is certainly outdated. The covers are the latest covers (which to be honest surprised me), but that will be changing soon as well (SQUEE!) Last I checked, which to be honest was far too long ago, there were three different versions of “Dr. Fixit” on Amazon. Now, there’s only the latest one on my author page (paperback vs. ebook notwithstanding), and when I do a search it’s the same (WHEW!) so that’s nice to see. Unfortunately now I have another version I’ll be updating onto the site, so I’m a bit worried about confusion there…

I have really two choices here, as far as I can see:

Begin a whole new profile on Createspace (Amazon’s self-publishing platform) under Jessica Crichton as opposed to Jessica Rising.

Rework my current Createspace profile to update everything.

There are pros and cons to both of these choices. For the former, obviously starting a whole new profile would make it clean and crisp from the gate, which is always nice. Plus, a quick Amazon search for “Jessica Crichton” turns up nothing except a link to Michael Crichton, which would be a great little bit of inner-site promotion even if his books are very different than mine. However, it would leave the Jessica Rising profile out there in stasis, including two different versions of “Dr. Fixit” and “Zombies” on the Amazon site, which could get really confusing really fast. Confusion is the LAST thing I want on my readers’ minds! The latter would take more work and probably frustration (Amazon isn’t known for being that user-friendly to indie writers) plus I’d worry I’d miss some bit of something and end up with a little mess leftover in the end, but it would bypass that whole doubling up thing, and I already have a years-long presence on Amazon there, including reviews I don’t want to lose. (Which, if you’re a writer, you know is seriously important!)

Hmmm… I think I’m going to try the latter and see how it goes. The reviews are certainly worth the extra work, though I still worry about missing loose ends.